My friends Jennifer and Juliette deserve “thank you” notes. These two fabulous women, whom I most often connect with via Facebook, were kind enough to send me special “happies” last week to celebrate the move to my new home office. Sweets and jewelry–two of a girl’s best friends. The gifts have served to confirm for me the power of acknowledgement, even in the business world. I’ll save the soap box for another post, but the common courtesies we learned from our mothers and grandmothers are just as important for doing business as they were for sweet 16 parties and high school graduations. The fact is; “please” and “thank you” are solid marketing strategies–perhaps even more so in today’s digital age than ever before.

To that end, I decided some custom Small Pond notecards were in order based on a few sketchy ideas. Literally. I think I’ve mentioned that I have been weeding through files (and piles) over the last few weeks. It’s an integral part of moving offices. Sadly, it hasn’t been an integral part of my organizational routine, so the process of late has netted some crazy stuff.

I keep most of my sketches for design projects, especially those “doodles” used in developing logo designs. The sketches are kind of like visual brainstorming sessions with overlapping images and notes, little dots or boxes representing where the text might go, and the occasional note about reference material. These doodles sometimes segue into drawings on tracing paper (or bumwad, as I learned in architecture school) destined to be scanned. Being the design pack-rat that I am, I keep almost all these wrinkled pages. You just never know when they might come in handy.

As you can imagine, I found a considerable set of sketchy blissdom when weeding through my office piles, and dutifully filed them away in drawer #2 of the red filing cabinet. I decided they would make nice visuals for the inaugural “Sketch Paper” series of Small Pond notecards. I may subject you to more of the sketches and their stories here at Plop! as time goes on. Meanwhile, you are the first to have a peek at the notecard designs, and I plan to enlist the USPS in firing off a couple to Jennifer and Juliette this week. Saying “thank you” is important, even if the “look” is a little sketchy. Come to think of it, YOU deserve a “thank you” for reading these Pond ramblings. So, message me your address and I’ll fire off one for you too!